This was to be my last day of being un-wived, divorced by a stranger with whom I’d shared a bed for twenty-eight years, until he exchanged me for a younger, more pliant model with wide eyes, a belly unstretched by childbirth and an inheritance. My blood fired at the thought. I’d shredded the court documents into confetti and soaked them in a pail of water. My business. Finished business. No one needed to know the details, especially after today. I didn’t want to remember the details myself. Would he think anything of me when he found out what I’d done, how I’d tardily asserted myself without requesting permission? I tilt my hand. The bone-deep indentation where my wedding band used to sit glows pale in the warming July sun.
Suddenly, my nose is dripping, although I’m starting to sweat. Not tears. No more crying. I reach into the kangaroo pocket of grey fleece, rooting out crumpled wrappers and a linty tissue with a chunk of chewed watermelon-flavoured gum stuck in one corner. A page of lined yellow notepad drops to the deck. I gingerly crouch to pick it up.
I flip open a creased origami paper fortune-teller and read the quartet of wonky penciled printed messages: “Dear Grandma your fun. Thanks for teeching me two fish. I lov you verrry much. Cen we ro for icescreem today.”
My breath catches in my throat. My heart lurches painfully.
Like the prongs of a plug jammed into a socket, the words are conduits to a door I’d hope to keep closed. I’d half-hoped ‘it’ would be over, that I could have finished things my way this time. But now, my pulse fizzes with warmth. Another morning has dawned. Another day of promise and choices. I’m no coward, but being brave is so very hard. I refold the note and tuck it under the lace at my left breast.
As I organize my stiff fingers to untie the nylon rope chafing my ankle, it dawns on me the cacophony inhabiting the spaces in my mind has stilled. The busy silence of awakenings crowds out the randomness of thought. I stretch the kinks from my spine. The breeze rustles the hair inside my ears as I slowly shift my head from right to left. What is it I’m supposed to hear?
Above the crest at the end of the lake where the day began, a red-tailed hawk coasts the thermals then plunges into the bush. There’s a scream that isn’t mine. I murmur a fragment of prayer. Somewhere behind the lee of the island, a trolling motor coughs to life. The hesitant ricochet of bird calls ripples from the far end of the bush, where the deeps are warming to navy serge by the rising fires of daybreak. A chorus of croaking from scattered throats rumbles from wet holes in the cedar swamp. The restless marsh bristles with the catcalls of red-winged blackbirds. A brace of crows tussles in the gulley across the way, discordantly arguing over the soggy carcass of a crab. By now the sun is fully incandescent. All the dark edges have burned back to clear air. The lake is alive. As am I.
I turn towards the rustle at my back. A hare leaps into the trees. A couple of skunks pause on the cobbled track from the cottage. The breeze riffles their pelts. We hold still. A door bangs in the distance, then a toilet flushes. They waddle into the brush behind the boathouse. There’s a yipping sound followed by a red flash of coyote through the bleached boughs of fallen hardwoods.
My intentions have shifted from ending to waiting.
With a sigh, I coil the yellow line in a neat figure eight around the brass dock cleat. I shift from one foot to the other and realize that my sense of balance has returned: the vertigo of doubt that plagued my days and nights for months has dissipated. I strip off the hoodie and my sweatshirt, fold the clothing into a neat square and tuck it under one arm.
As I back away from the lake, my footfalls on the warming planks send shivers across the skin of the placid lake. At the hump where the deck and the path meet, I stop. Something mottled and sinuous slides from beneath an untidy stack of firewood off to the right. There are the smells that brings back memories, neutral now instead of bad – rotting leaves starting to bake and of the earth giving up its cool under the brightening canopy of wind-shoved branches. I fill my lungs with the scents of damp mint, the lemon balm gone wild, the wet pine wood chips.
Screen doors slam. The sharp, high morning chatter of children planting bed-warmed toes onto night-cold floors shatters the silence. I catch the fragrant fumes of perking coffee and sizzling bacon. A small, insistent voice calls my name.
